Gary Paulsen Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

I spent uncounted hours sitting at the bow looking at the water and the sky, studying each wave, different from the last, seeing how it caught the light, the air, the wind; watching patterns, the sweep of it all, and letting it take me. The sea.

Gary Paulsen
If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can't be in books. The book needs you.

Gary Paulsen
When he sat alone in the darkness and cried and was done, all done with it, nothing had changed. His leg still hurt, it was still dark, he was still alone and the self-pity had accomplished nothing.

Gary Paulsen
He had to keep thinking of them because if he forgot them and did not think of them they might forget about him. And he had to keep hoping.

Gary Paulsen
Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination—except that it was all reality.

Gary Paulsen
This beginning motion, this first time when a sail truly filled and the boat took life and knifed across the lake under perfect control, this was so beautiful it stopped my breath...

Gary Paulsen
Do what you can as you can. Trouble, problems, will come no matter what you do, and you must respond as they come.

Gary Paulsen
He could not play the game without hope; could not play the game without a dream. They had taken it all away from him now, they had turned away from him and there was nothing for him now...He was alone and there was nothing for him.

Gary Paulsen
Initially, he worried that he might be going crazy. But then he decided if you felt you were crazy you weren't really crazy because he had heard somewhere that crazy people didn't know they were insane.

Gary Paulsen
And the last thought he had that morning as he closed his eyes was: I hope the tornado hit the moose.

Gary Paulsen
Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience - waiting, and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking.

Gary Paulsen
He did not know how long it took, but later he looked back on this time of crying in the corner of the dark cave and thought of it as when he learned the most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn't work. It wasn't just that it was wrong to do, or that it was considered incorrect. It was more than that—it didn't work.

Gary Paulsen
Part of our problem is that we run around naming things without asking them if they want to be named. Then after we name them, they don't know they're named anyway. A tree doesn't know it's a tree; a fish doesn't know it's a fish; and if the fish did know, it would probably be upset by it. Who wants to be called a fish?

Gary Paulsen
It was as though I had been dying of thirst and the librarian had handed me a five gallon bucket of water. I drank and drank. The only reason I am here and not in prison is because of that woman. I was a loser, but she showed me the power of reading.

Gary Paulsen